In the 1980s, when I was studying for my Masters degree in Soviet History, one of my mentors intrigued me with a story of one of his past students managing to improbably reach the putative and later reviled saviour of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Alexander Kerensky, on the phone. Through the years, that story has somehow stayed with me, fodder for a short story that somehow stayed in incubation and refused to be born. Soon after him telling me that story, history repeated itself with Mikhail Gorbachev, and my incubation got a new protagonist to replace Kerensky. Still, it refused to be born.

It took the decision to close my own son's high school, the oldest in Canada, to take it out of stillbirth and breathe life into it.